The Windsor Star Article

FOR EVERYONE: The band Michou has used Twitter, the latest online social networking system, to organize an arts and crafts event at Phog Lounge. Working on a banner are Julia Loch, left, Nicole Drouillard, Eddie Phouthisap, Stefan Cvetkovic and Mike Hargreaves.

Photograph by: Scott Webster, Windsor Star, Windsor Star

One guy just had Skittles and thinks they suck. Another dude just got an iPhone and his sex life has suddenly improved and his hair is fuller than ever.

This and lots of other super useful information about people you may or may not know is available 24/7 on Twitter, the latest craze sweeping the online world.

Forget Facebook. It’s so 2007. Twitter is the new black.

“I like the intimacy of it,” said Michael Hargreaves of the Windsor band Michou. “You can say ‘I’m going to go out to open mic tonight, you should come.’ Then you show up and what you do know, there’s six people there just to meet you for a beer or something.”

For the out of touch among us, Twitter is a free microblogging service that lets you post 140-character notes and subscribe to the tweets of other members.

Twitterers can stay plugged into all of this important information through http://www.twitter.com or various handheld devices.

But remember, all the posts are public. Anyone can read them. This seems to appeal to the narcissist in many who assume we’re all dying to find out what they’re doing minute by minute. A guy who recently announced to the world he was eating a waffle and peanut butter and a girl who revealed she was fixing her future sister-in-law’s hair seem to fall into this category.

Naturally, celebrities are catching on, including Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears. You’ll be happy to know, by the way, that Brit enjoys a milkshake with dinner.

But the extremely public nature of it all does present perils. Take David George-Cosh, former Financial Post reporter and one-time Windsor Star intern. George-Cosh was the topic of conversation on dozens of websites, and the Post issued an apology, after he got into it with a marketing person on Twitter last month and started dropping F-bombs.

For others, Twitter’s public forum offers something bigger than all of us: a brave new world for artistic expression.

“Art is about expression,” said Hargreaves, who uses Twitter to arrange and notify people of events for his band. “So typing or writing out on Twitter is another form of expression. It’s just more small, isolated amounts. Rather than 10 songs you give them 300 tweets.”

“You want to say something people can reply to or feel part of. It’s the same way with any kind of art.”